TO THE PUBLIC

Before going down among you to pull out your decaying teeth, your running ears, your tounges full of sores,
Before breaking your putrid bones,
Before opening your cholera-infested belly and taking out for use as fertilizer
your too fatted liver, your ignoble spleen and your diabetic kidneys,
Before tearing out your ugly sexual organ, incontinent and slimy,
Before extinguishing your appetite for beauty, ecstasy, sugar, philosophy,
mathematical and poetic metaphysical pepper and cucumbers,
Before disinfecting you with vitriol, cleansing you and shellacking
you with passion,

Before all that,
We shall take a big antiseptic bath,
And we warn you
We are murderers.

Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes
http://www.peak.org/~dadaist/English/Graphics/manifesto.html

gathered before thirty odd friends and family in the park,
she stepped atop a knee high stone wall or bench
and opened her mouth.

people walking past beyond this group of forty or so
turned their faces toward this meek young woman,
clutching in nervous hand a written page
and across her tongue and flipping onto the stones beneath
came forth a guppy with a single yellow stripe.

she cleared her throat;
a sea urchin emerged bloody with spines slowly oscillating
like caterpillars.

one of the fifty came forward with a white napkin
and was struck down by a snake quick and angry,
sharp eyes and teeth smooth scales to the bushes,
out of the sun where she sat exhausted,
but there was more to read in hand now not nervous but
shaking with thrill.

the hundred gasped when a yellow neck rose up
and a great gray beast leaped and cracked the stones

and the thousand made way as newt hid, eagle
bore down on the air, octopus bubbled, jaguar slank,
lemur grasped, horse hooves clicked (legs unsteady),
pidgeon cooed (crunching centipede), ape cried in fear,
and dog hustled, all to be free
of the million eyes closing on her again
and finding only empty clothes
and a bit of blood
and moisture
.

Man`i*fes"to (?), n.; pl. Manifestoes (#). [It. manifesto. See Manifest, n. & a.]

A public declaration, usually of a prince, sovereign, or other person claiming large powers, showing his intentions, or proclaiming his opinions and motives in reference to some act done or contemplated by him; as, a manifesto declaring the purpose of a prince to begin war, and explaining his motives.

Bouvier.

It was proposed to draw up a manifesto, setting forth the grounds and motives of our taking arms. Addison

Frederick, in a public manifesto, appealed to the Empire against the insolent pretensions of the pope. Milman.

© Webster 1913.

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